When she was nine and I was eleven, my sister came running down the stairs on trembling skinny legs to find me in the basement. I was lying on my back watching some evening sitcom, a pillow tucked under my hands, hands folded under my head, a basketball propped under the backs of my knees. She had just heard important news by way of my mother’s private conversation and needed to report it to me right away.
She panted. Placing her hands on her knees, she bowed to catch her breath. Pant. Pant.
“Ro.” Pant. Pant. I sat up, birthing the basketball between my folded legs.
“Pap-Pap has cancer!”
Her eyes, perpetually large and wide, were magnified by circumstance. I traced the skin of the basketball, brown, matching my skin. Not like those kiddie orange ones. Dragging my fingers through the black stripes, I stopped at a junction of two black trails and gripped the ball with both hands.
I threw that ball at her as hard as I could. Pelted it directly at her stomach with a chest pass that would spring tears of joy from the eyes of old Coach Shorter. She doubled over in pain then immediately scrambled to her feet again, standing erect as a soldier. Bitter tears rolled down her cheeks, falling into the cracks of her twisted mouth.
“WHY WOULD YOU TELL ME THAT?!” I screamed. My chest heaved furiously.
“Ouch,” she muttered softly. She stood rigidly for a few more moments before she clambered back up the stairs on her skinny legs.
I wasn’t planning on writing any more today. But sometimes stories that we’ve long forgotten are triggered by a sentence, like a rotten smell, inducing urgent word vomit.
When she reads this, my sister will recall the moment that had knocked the wind from the both of us, hers by way of a basketball, mine by way of her news. She’ll say that the ball really did hurt. She’ll say my guilty conscience is too active. She’ll say I need to, like, chill out. She’ll keep on loving me.
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